Missing Witches - Missing Witches： Marjorie Cameron - I Am That Dream Of Wings

00:00:00.500 Missing Witches, you can do so by buying yourself a present from Foxglove Farm. What a wonderful way to support us. Because, of course, by supporting Foxglove Farm, you're supporting Missing Witches.

00:00:12.500 This episode is about wild creation in the liminal spaces. And it's about magical thinking and fate.

00:00:18.500 and a remarkable artist witch who had to figure out who she was

00:00:22.180 after the unthinkable atrocities of the Second World War

00:00:25.460 and outside of a powerful man's powerful idea about her destiny.

00:00:29.680 A man who did the Babylon working

00:00:31.340 and believed she was the fire elemental he had summoned.

00:00:34.920 And maybe in a way she was,

00:00:36.880 but she was also an entirely her own self.

00:00:39.940 Yes, this episode is about Marjorie Cameron and Jack Parsons

00:00:43.140 and it's about love and how we cope when we lose someone

00:00:46.200 And it's about 1960s California and art and drugs and sex magic and becoming gods through art.

00:00:52.380 And it's about how the world changes.

00:00:54.800 L. Ron Hubbard makes a brief appearance as a sci-fi writing ceremonial magic apprentice

00:00:59.080 and a seedy con man pre-Scientology.

00:01:02.680 Are you surprised?

00:01:04.060 And we'll get to talk about early rocket science and UFOs and the beat generation 0.60

00:01:08.040 and yet another artist witch who also might have been a spy, 0.54

00:01:11.460 but who was above all and all her life an artist.

00:01:14.420 with all the immensity and multitudes that word contains.

00:01:19.400 Yes, loves, gather round and burn a little something down

00:01:22.280 in honor of the wild and wise and hallucinatory 0.99

00:01:25.840 and magical bisexual fire elemental artist witch

00:01:29.680 who preferred to be known only as Cameron. 1.00

00:01:32.880 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:35.760 Be a witch. 1.00

00:01:37.000 Be a witch. 1.00

00:01:37.800 Be a witch. 1.00

00:01:39.340 You must be a witch.

00:01:40.620 she's been called an icon of the beat scene in los angeles who held an underground even mythic

00:01:48.480 status within art history people are just beginning to understand her influence in

00:01:52.560 post-war art and culture a leader in the counterculture and mother of a uniquely american

00:01:58.960 magical lineage an essay in los angeles review of books by stephi nelson is one of the major

00:02:05.100 sources for this episode i'd like to start where she ends here's the full quote of her conclusion

00:02:10.280 In a letter to his wife that was part of their voluminous correspondence while she was traveling during the early days of their marriage, Parsons attempted to impress upon her that the invocation of lesser forces, including angels, demons, and elementals, is far more dangerous than the invocation of gods.

00:02:25.940 The lower work, he continued, is an act of science, while in the higher work you are actually wooing the god. It is an act of art.

00:02:33.700 Following this logic, Nelson continues,

00:02:35.860 maybe we can conclude that Cameron, the elemental herself,

00:02:39.140 was invoking only God, the higher force, in her work,

00:02:42.600 leaving us with her art.

00:02:44.180 Parsons believed Cameron's work went beyond his own,

00:02:47.160 that her art magic was a crux in the rebirth of the world

00:02:50.260 into a better, freer place.

00:02:52.040 He wrote,

00:02:53.040 You, Cinderella of the Wastelands, have chosen the way of the hero,

00:02:56.420 and the gods alone may guess the end of your path.

00:02:59.720 Her path was a struggle, and it didn't go in straight lines,

00:03:02.380 and there isn't much of her art left since she had a practice of ritually burning some.

00:03:07.020 My other favorite writer about Cameron, so far anyway, is Tanya M. Layden,

00:03:10.300 who wrote a piece called The Witch Woman Sings for LA Weekly, where we find this story.

00:03:15.460 Shirley Berman remembers Cameron calling shortly after she burned her art in an incinerator in the

00:03:20.000 mid-50s. When the Bermans arrived at Cameron's home, they found a fragile, trembling artist,

00:03:25.200 her work destroyed. Decades later, Kenneth Anger explained she was releasing the spirit that she 0.99

00:03:30.020 put in the drawing into the fire, meaning Cameron sacrificed her art as an act of conscious,

00:03:35.600 occult-inspired transmutation. Once the art moved beyond her imagination, it had also served its

00:03:41.040 purpose and became unnecessary, providing Cameron the opportunity to emancipate herself from it

00:03:46.720 physically. It was released, Anger continued. In other words, if she'd kept them as drawings or

00:03:51.520 paintings, she would have been enchained to them. The destroyed art includes much of what's featured

00:03:56.140 in The Wormwood Star, which has since become a rare visual record of Cameron's earlier works.

00:04:01.180 Nonetheless, Cameron created even more and continued her peripatetic existence,

00:04:05.240 even with her daughter in tow. In 1957, the two moved in with Cameron's friend,

00:04:09.240 David Meltzer, a poet in San Francisco. And today, Meltzer laments the fact that interest

00:04:14.240 in Cameron's work became so entwined with Alistair Crowley and Jack Parsons rather than

00:04:18.820 standing on its own. I must admit, he says, that any time I've run into a person who's

00:04:23.320 interested in Cameron, and they're usually guys, it's because they're interested in Parsons and

00:04:27.840 Black Magic and Crowley, kind of like Beavis's and Butthead's 77-year-old Meltzer quips. I had

00:04:33.860 great regard for her work, both graphic and written, and I'm sorry that her past involvement

00:04:38.840 with Crowley seems to have been one of the primary waves that she's perceived, rather than really as a

00:04:43.600 very fascinating and worthwhile artist and poet. I mean, yes, she was a practitioner of the hermetic,

00:04:49.340 the occult, but it's unfortunate that she's not regarded as the creative artist and strong spirit

00:04:54.300 that she is. The most comprehensive retrospective of her work was at the L.A. Museum of Contemporary

00:04:59.640 Art in October 2014, and the collection video and writing by the curator is powerful, especially as

00:05:05.860 it moves across the last pieces in the collection, a humming resonant series of line drawings that

00:05:10.860 look like maps of sound waves, or like singing messages from the universe in a collection called

00:05:16.660 Pluto transiting the 12th house. These are so different from the rest of her work. I think

00:05:21.940 about them when I meditate looking out the window at our lake, where Amy and Andy are sitting now,

00:05:27.820 steely and cold in the fall. These are works for later in life, with a knowledge about fall.

00:05:35.500 Mocha also released a video of her reading her poetry called An Evening with Cameron.

00:05:39.940 It was her last public performance, and it's out there on the YouTubes.

00:05:43.280 she reads steady gray hair wild and candle haloed she says these things and much more

00:05:51.380 i took took pieces that sang out to me to share with you

00:05:54.900 i am that dream of wings you are the totality i said it before i pride all truth and lies to

00:06:04.580 shreds to appease the doubt until it lasts not through a single act but through all acts i find

00:06:09.900 myself in the landscape of your star. Mother, all life has fed at your golden breast. All dreams are

00:06:16.360 spun from your silken lyre. Oh, mother, you have come at last out of the earth, born from the corn.

00:06:24.440 Oh, the many steps of the way. Oh, the many steps of the way.

00:06:31.300 Okay, now that we've begun to sketch her from her own words, let's step back and begin again.

00:06:37.000 because Cameron has spent a lot of time as a side note in other men's stories

00:06:40.980 or as a lurid caricature and when I turn to those references to help spin her story I want you to

00:06:47.400 hold this image in your mind steady in the candlelight a lifetime of art that maybe summoned

00:06:52.980 God maybe helped birth the wild new unenslaved era of humanity burning around her expanding

00:07:00.840 around all of us, rising ever brighter now, that age of Aquarius we've been watching come

00:07:07.120 slowly, brightly, both frail and infinitely powerful, both flawed and wildly brave.

00:07:17.440 Cameron was born April 23, 1922, in Belle Plaine, Iowa, and if Spencer Kansa, author of her

00:07:24.340 unauthorized but heavily interview-based biography, is to be believed, she grew up haunted by her

00:07:30.380 mother's sister who died after insisting she be named Marjorie instead of Gail. Cameron was much

00:07:36.580 more of a raging Gail than a Marge and despite her aunt's attempt at getting thee to a nunnery 0.62

00:07:41.080 she ended up an artist witch who broke the hearts of girls and boys in Iowa and beyond who briefly

00:07:47.500 ran a sex cult in the desert and saw ghosts all her life and she was a gifted artist from childhood.

00:07:53.660 Belle Plaine residents remembered when still basically a kid she was commissioned by the town

00:07:58.060 to make art in patterns along the banks of a roadway for a celebration. At 15, she became

00:08:03.620 pregnant, and her mother performed an abortion at home. After that, her late-night cemetery visits

00:08:10.180 became more regular. Even when an abortion is your choice, and clearly the best choice, it can 0.97

00:08:15.400 reverberate in you for a while, I think, sometimes forever. It's a choice no person makes lightly,

00:08:22.440 and though we know from all kinds of statistics around the world showing a reduction in crime 0.98

00:08:26.560 rates, 18 years following the legalization of abortion, that pregnant people are very good at 0.92

00:08:31.780 knowing they should or should not bring a life into the world, it can still give you a shadow

00:08:36.060 for a little while, or a lightness, a freedom, a deep knowingness that your own life and decision

00:08:42.180 making is of value, that you can have power, that each of us carries with us not just life,

00:08:47.880 but also death at all times. The weight of this act carries the weight of the whole world we live

00:08:53.100 and whether that world is good and safe.

00:08:56.760 Whether this piece of rumor from Kansa about Cameron is true,

00:09:00.200 it is definitely a story that has been true of many women. 0.98

00:09:04.100 Dangerous home abortions by unqualified people 1.00

00:09:06.880 with questionable motivations proliferate

00:09:09.360 when safe legal options aren't available and people die. 0.99

00:09:14.320 Let's not make any fucking mistakes on that one. 0.98

00:09:18.560 Ironically, Cameron's ticket out of small-town America 1.00

00:09:21.200 and toward the counterculture came through the United States Navy, which she joined in 1943

00:09:25.800 as part of a women's initiative spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt. She became a mapmaker for the 0.97

00:09:31.100 Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. The last-named military form of address also gave her the moniker

00:09:36.180 that she felt suited her better than Marjorie. Cameron was among the first women to ever join

00:09:41.120 the U.S. Armed Forces, and according to Kansa, she worked on a covert mission that brought her

00:09:45.220 into contact with Churchill and de Gaulle and that required her to lean on her powerful and

00:09:49.500 seductive presence to elicit secrets. I mean, maybe. We definitely knew she drew maps and

00:09:56.760 designed sets and costumes for propaganda efforts, and that she walked away from the

00:10:01.620 army one day but was still mysteriously granted an honorable discharge. And then she made her way

00:10:06.600 to California and stepped into the jazz world of the house called the Parsonage, Jack Parson's

00:10:12.360 house where rocket scientists and sci-fi writers hung with Alistair Crowley students and lodge

00:10:16.740 members, and where black and white musicians held late night jams and cohabitated illegally.

00:10:22.240 Okay, so Jack Parsons is an occult conspiracy theorist, Goldmine, apparently using rituals

00:10:27.340 dedicated to Pan to get some of the first rockets to fly, helping found the jet propulsion lab that

00:10:33.180 would contribute to an insane piece of unfathomable magic sending human beings, Earth animals, off

00:10:39.260 their mother planet to the moon. And he worked magic derived from Dr. John D., royal astrologer

00:10:44.600 to Elizabeth I, who came highly recommended by Crowley, out in the desert by Devil's Gate with

00:10:50.420 L. Ron Hubbard as his scribe. Yes, L. Ron Hubbard, who stole Jack's wife Betty, and then stole $20,000

00:10:57.140 from him, and then went on to ever greater swindles. In his book Strange Angel, George Pendle

00:11:03.120 writes, driven to distraction by the loss of Betty, and without the incessant work of wartime

00:11:07.700 rocket research to absorb his attention, Parsons threw himself into the only other part of his life

00:11:12.360 he could control, his magic. He'd been turning his interests to the more perverse branches of

00:11:18.220 occultism in his quest to conjure up actual spiritual phenomena. And so began the fevered

00:11:23.880 days of the Babylon working. He began by tracing five-pointed stars in the air and reciting ancient 0.95

00:11:29.580 invocations in both English and Enochian, the strange sing-song language that Dee thought was

00:11:34.620 passed down to him from angels. Strewn around him on the floor were paper tablets covered with

00:11:39.600 arcane symbols and languages. He recited line after line of ominous and obscure scripture.

00:11:46.580 Dear thou me, for I am the angel of Paphro, O Sauronophris, O Sauronophris. This is thy true

00:11:56.140 name, handed down to the prophets of Israel. The ritual called for focused masturbation, 0.98

00:12:03.080 what the golden bow would have recognized as sympathetic magic, as Parsons tried to fertilize 0.88

00:12:08.000 the magical tablets around him and bring his elemental to life. Finally, he performed the

00:12:13.240 banishing rites, a symbolic erasing of all the previous rituals by retracing in reverse all the

00:12:19.640 pentagrams and hexagrams he had drawn in the air. The entire process took some two hours and it

00:12:24.600 invariably left Parsons both physically and mentally exhausted. And believing that by jerking

00:12:30.680 off alone in a circle, repeating a piece of poetry onto paper he had drawn, he was creating 0.96

00:12:37.300 his ideal partner. He performed the ritual repeatedly over the following weeks, so thirsty

00:12:43.880 for results that soon he was invoking his elemental twice each day. He liked to play

00:12:48.480 Furokofiev's second violin concerto on his gramophone as an accompaniment. He started using

00:12:54.060 his own blood instead of semen, and his mind sensitive with anticipation, he began to record

00:12:59.220 any phenomena he thought were related to his actions. A violent windstorm followed the first

00:13:04.440 ritual. On another night, he was awakened by a series of loud and rapid knocks, and the table

00:13:09.640 lamp across from his bed was thrown violently to the floor, even though the windstorm had died out.

00:13:15.080 In a letter to Crowley, he announced, I have been extremely careful and conscientious in this

00:13:19.060 ritual, lending all my will and scientific training to its precision and preparation,

00:13:23.800 yet nothing seems to have happened. The windstorm is very interesting, but that's not what I asked

00:13:28.400 for. A few days later, he performed the ritual twice more and observed further unexplained

00:13:33.240 phenomena. At around 9 p.m. the electricity failed, and Hubbard, who was in the kitchen at the time,

00:13:38.760 called out to Parsons, saying he had been struck strongly on the right shoulder. Parsons hurried

00:13:43.720 to Hubbard's side, and in Parsons' word the two observed a brownish-yellow light about seven feet

00:13:49.120 high in the kitchen. Parsons ran back to his bedroom, grabbed one of the swords hanging from

00:13:53.420 the wall, and hurried back to the kitchen to perform a banishing ritual, burning sulfur and

00:13:58.140 tobacco to aid him in his task. The figure seemed to diminish, and Parsons followed it into the

00:14:03.320 library, all the while drawing pentagrams in the air with his sword. Finally, the form dwindled

00:14:07.980 into nothing. Parsons diligently noted that Hubbard's right arm remained paralyzed for the

00:14:12.980 rest of the night. Parsons was already impressed by Hubbard's grasp of Crowley's teachings, but now

00:14:19.720 he became convinced of Hubbard's supreme magical sensitivity. The distress Parsons felt about

00:14:24.920 Hubbard's relationship with Betty, was quickly overcome by his remarkable will to believe.

00:14:29.900 He invited Hubbard to sit in on his future rituals, and the visions continued to appear.

00:14:35.380 On one occasion, Hubbard said that he saw an apparition of Wilfred Smith materialize behind

00:14:39.660 Parsons. Before Parsons knew what was happening, Hubbard pinned it to the door with four throwing

00:14:44.440 knives, with which he was expert. Later in his room, Parsons heard the strange raps again,

00:14:49.720 and a buzzing metallic voice crying, let me go free.

00:14:54.180 Were these really spirits speaking to him, conjured up by his rituals,

00:14:57.680 or was someone else providing Parsons with the phenomenon he so desperately wanted?

00:15:02.560 Hubbard had taken over Smith's old bedroom across the hall,

00:15:05.360 so he and Betty would have been ideally positioned to stage supernatural occurrences,

00:15:09.800 especially with the help of the house's secret passageways.

00:15:12.880 If Hubbard was using his imaginative skills to give Parsons satisfaction,

00:15:16.960 then Parsons was all too willing to accept the gift.

00:15:20.720 However, Parsons did not care to speculate about any underhanded tactics.

00:15:24.760 Instead, he wrote in his record,

00:15:26.200 I felt a great pressure and tension in the house that night,

00:15:28.520 which was also noticed by the other occupants.

00:15:30.820 The tension might, of course, just as easily have been caused

00:15:33.460 by Parsons' insistence on burning sulfur in the kitchen

00:15:36.200 and swinging a sword through the living room,

00:15:38.020 not to mention the twice-daily rituals chanted loudly in the Enochian tongue.

00:15:43.120 The tension might, of course, just as easily have been caused

00:15:45.740 by Parsons' insistence on burning sulfur in the kitchen.

00:15:49.720 and swinging a sword through the living room,

00:15:53.160 not to mention the twice-daily rituals chanted loudly in the Enochian tongue.

00:15:58.840 After two weeks, Parsons and Hubbard traveled into the Mojave Desert together.

00:16:03.440 It had been some time since Parsons had come out here for his rocket experiments.

00:16:07.580 More recently, he had escaped to the desert for seclusion,

00:16:10.600 in which to meditate and practice his magic.

00:16:13.120 His favorite place was marked by the intersection of two massive power lines.

00:16:16.840 at sunset the two men stood beneath them and suddenly parsons felt the tension snap

00:16:22.580 i turned to him and said it is done in absolute certainty that the operation was accomplished

00:16:28.420 i returned home and found a young woman answering the requirements waiting for me

00:16:33.880 parsons had summoned his elemental her arrival coincided exactly with parsons return from the

00:16:41.180 Mojave. He was overwhelmed by the magnetism between the two of them. In a letter to Crowley, Parsons

00:16:46.880 declared, I have my elemental, describing her as fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere

00:16:53.640 and perverse, with extraordinary personality and intelligence. He immediately began performing sex 0.97

00:17:00.080 magic rituals with her. A strange but not atypical welcome for a new member of the household. 0.74

00:17:06.120 I am to invoke continually this now being possible and easy, he wrote to Crowley.

00:17:11.480 And for Candy, she cared little about the mystical dimensions of their bedroom antics.

00:17:16.560 I didn't know very much about Jack's magical work.

00:17:19.000 In fact, I probably derided it, she recalled.

00:17:21.440 Nevertheless, for the next two weeks, the couple barely left Parson's room.

00:17:25.700 The magical working he now began was his most ambitious yet.

00:17:29.340 He believed he could incarnate an actual goddess on earth, a female messiah named Babylon.

00:17:35.360 The ritual, Pendle explained to LA Weekly, was Parsons' attempt to usher in a new era in mankind's history.

00:17:42.140 He believed that this age would begin with the arrival of Babylon, a female goddess in human form.

00:17:47.820 Parsons' Babylon, inspired by the Babylon in the Bible's Book of Revelations,

00:17:51.940 was to bring about a new libertarian age of free love and anti-authoritarianism,

00:17:57.760 a world vision that was fulfilled to a certain extent with the arrival of the 1960s.

00:18:02.880 He continues,

00:18:04.220 Cameron was an intrinsic part of this summoning,

00:18:06.540 and Parsons bound her to him through this epic-changing event.

00:18:10.040 This was not just an intense relationship, it was an apocalyptic one.

00:18:14.060 Even after Parsons' death, the Babylon working would stay with Cameron,

00:18:17.440 infusing her life with a narrative of epic proportions.

00:18:20.760 In interviews, however, Cameron was more circumspect.

00:18:24.040 They worked with me without telling me what was going on.

00:18:28.080 Everybody assumes I was in on it, that I really knew, but I didn't know.

00:18:31.400 according to cameron hubbard ran off to miami soon after the ritual and the communications

00:18:38.560 got more and more weird a ouija board instructed her and parsons to get rid of hubbard's stuff and

00:18:44.520 get the hell out of their house she said so they did while cameron described her relationship with

00:18:49.320 parsons as a love story it wasn't without drama beginning in 1948 she lived in mexico for two 0.89

00:18:54.540 years after she and parsons agreed to an open marriage i associated with homosexuals i had

00:18:59.580 lovers among bullfighters. I went nude bathing with mariachis. I danced in a whorehouse, she 0.98

00:19:05.600 recalled in a 1977 recording. After an impassioned letter-writing affair with Parsons, however,

00:19:12.800 Cameron moved back to California to physically reunite with him. The magical relationship between

00:19:17.580 Cameron and Parsons is typically presented as a teacher-student relationship, and it's clear that

00:19:22.240 Parsons had a profound influence on Cameron, sharing his knowledge of Kabbalah, tarot, astrology,

00:19:27.140 and more. But as he could tell immediately, she was also uncommonly independent. The couple famously

00:19:32.820 spent their first two weeks together in bed, but after they were married in late 1946, they were

00:19:38.400 apart for long periods and took other lovers. Cameron traveled to Europe in 1947 and the

00:19:44.360 following year left to study art in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico on the G.I. Ville. There she

00:19:49.280 encountered kindred spirits. Leonora Carrington, the surrealist artist who would also serve as an

00:19:54.960 important mentor to mystical filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, and met Renata Drucks and Paul

00:20:01.980 Matheson, who would later connect her to Kenneth Anger. While Cameron was on her way to making

00:20:06.740 love and art and meeting beautiful minds in Mexico, Parsons fell down the last of the rabbit

00:20:11.640 hole set up for him by L. Ron Hubbard. He put his entire savings into a scheme for Hubbard and Jack's

00:20:17.580 ex-wife to buy yachts in Miami and sail them to California, which ended up being a setup for them

00:20:22.520 to party on yachts and traveled the world on Parsons' dime. Parsons called them back with a

00:20:28.120 storm, but the money was long gone. Shortly after this, Hubbard pens a Dianetics essay in Astounding

00:20:34.300 Science Fiction, and it's a hit. He does away with the complexities of psychiatry, and for only $600

00:20:40.900 you can start to go clear. Within months, he published a book, which became a national

00:20:45.740 bestseller. Pendle suggests Hubbard took some philosophy from Alistair Crowley and built the

00:20:50.880 world religion Crowley had envisioned himself at the helm of. Crowley saw through Hubbard and

00:20:56.160 warned Parsons about him before he died. We don't know what Cameron thought, but she watched these

00:21:00.740 men wanting desperately to summon power to know and shape the universe. Imagine wanting to go to

00:21:06.780 the moon in the 1930s when the idea still got you laughed out of the room. Imagine trying to make

00:21:11.920 art and science and magic in the aftermath then of World War II, when one could be forgiven for

00:21:17.340 feeling nothing much made sense when humanity could go so deeply, violently insane. And then

00:21:22.720 imagine you are Cameron and you made it out of Bell Plane and out of the war machine and you

00:21:27.300 found the joyful, uninhibited jazz magic of the parsonage and a love who thought you were pure

00:21:33.080 fire goddess magic, who was even willing for you to have an open relationship and who thought your

00:21:39.000 art was holy and who, whether you shared his philosophy or not, believed in helping to bring

00:21:44.820 about a better day. And then imagine one day when you were packing up for a vacation, he dies

00:21:51.280 in a ball of fire. And you don't know why or how. Maybe it was magic gone too hot.

00:21:58.760 Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was murder by a crooked cop. At 23, Jack had been called 0.91

00:22:04.740 as an expert witness in the trial of Earl Kinnett, a dirty cop. He created a replica of the bomb

00:22:10.280 Kinnett used in the attempted assassination of a rival. Days before Parsons was killed by an almost

00:22:16.000 identical explosion, Kinnett had been set free. We can't say for sure, but we do know Cameron

00:22:22.620 believed he had been murdered, and she went off in a kind of a spiral after this. She made her

00:22:27.940 way to the desert. She made a home out there. No electricity, no running water, but it was beautiful

00:22:33.640 nonetheless, apparently. The home of an artist freed to wander late at night and talk to the

00:22:38.380 and welcome travelers and beautiful friends of all genders and races to get deeply high together

00:22:43.720 and a world made of art to practice sex magic or just fun kinky play. Maybe try to finish Jack's 0.74

00:22:50.560 work. Maybe get pregnant and give birth to that new dawn, that new life. People like to talk about 0.87

00:22:56.340 this part of her life like she was trying to start a sex cult. And yes, there is some weird 0.76

00:23:00.920 stuff with pairing up people of different races and some totally fucked up shit happened, I think. 0.99

00:23:06.040 but what it sounds most like to me is a witch in mourning. It makes me think of that other 0.99

00:23:12.380 California goddess, Joan Didion, and her book The Year of Magical Thinking about loss and how very

00:23:18.900 difficult our fragile world-shaping minds find it to adjust to the unexpected radical loss of the

00:23:25.120 ones we love, the ones we build our lives around. Because sometimes our magic does let us grip fate

00:23:31.400 and birth new realities. And sometimes on the flip side, we can lose touch with the world

00:23:37.200 by force of wanting something so hard, wanting someone to not be sick, wanting someone to not

00:23:42.980 be gone, wanting to light all of civilization on fire if it'll bring back the person who made us

00:23:47.720 feel safe and made things make sense. In a poem called Star by Jack Parsons, he writes,

00:23:55.300 I remember when I was a star in the night, a moving burning ember amid the bright clouds

00:24:00.500 of star fire going deathward to the womb. Going deathward to the womb. I'd love to know Cameron's

00:24:11.120 thoughts as she exchanged letters with Joseph Campbell about the hero's journey years after

00:24:15.620 Jack's death and after she came out of the desert. I wonder if Cameron and the great mythologist would

00:24:21.440 see in this a twist of the heroine's journey, or the witch's journey, or the journey of an

00:24:27.960 uncontainable woman in post-war, post-nuclear, post-moon landing America. Something modern

00:24:34.020 and ancient mythic about losing safety and love and going to the underworld, the other

00:24:39.320 world, the desert or the moon. And then the long, slow process of crafting a new skin,

00:24:45.820 building that dream of wings, being reborn.

00:24:50.260 We are trying as hard as we can to keep Missing Witches free and accessible for everyone.

00:24:55.420 So please check out our sponsor, Foxglove Farm, where you can subscribe to wonderful monthly gift boxes, or you can get teas, handmade soap.

00:25:07.160 Oh my gosh, teas with specific healing love worked into them.

00:25:11.620 This witch in her kitchen is combining herbs with a lot of knowledge and a lot of care, and a lot of ethical practices that make us feel really comfortable recommending them to you.

00:25:21.120 Extremely ethical practices.

00:25:22.520 i mean we went in we don't want to be hypocrites so we asked a lot of questions and honestly

00:25:27.240 sammy gave us every answer we were hoping for it's cruelty free she gets her herbs and everything

00:25:33.680 that she uses from the most ethical source she can find yeah it's palm oil free palm oil depresses

00:25:41.580 the fuck out of me i was so happy she said that yes i love orangutans yes so again i mean we're

00:25:47.900 so grateful and so lucky to be partnered with foxglove farm please go to foxglovefarm.com 0.97

00:25:54.300 and use offer code missingwitches for a super witchy 13 discount for now we look through keyholes

00:26:01.740 windows we watch as a camera lovingly moves through the landscape of her stunning paintings

00:26:07.840 in wormwood star one of the best places to see cameron's work since so much was ritually destroyed

00:26:13.720 in his autobiography nice guys don't work in hollywood harrington explained that the film

00:26:19.720 warmwood star is really about cameron's work as a painter and the thrust of the film is to present

00:26:24.060 the artist as an alchemist who through her creative work becomes herself transmuted into gold

00:26:28.960 one of the best places to see and understand her magnetic presence and to see the way other artists

00:26:34.700 in her scene perceived her is in kenneth anger's mythical hallucinatory film inauguration of the

00:26:39.760 Pleasure Dome, from 1954. As legend has it, when director and star first met, Cameron proclaimed,

00:26:45.500 I am the Scarlet Woman, and Anger responded, I've been waiting to meet you for a thousand years.

00:26:51.060 James Conway wrote for Strange Flowers, Cameron retains a special role in the history of

00:26:56.000 experimental filmmaking for her part in inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. An extraordinary

00:27:01.300 multi-leveled piece of film art, inauguration represents a ritualistic parade of deities and

00:27:06.260 archetypes. Cameron, draped in a shawl which once belonged to Rudolf Valentino, plays both the

00:27:12.320 Scarlet Woman and the Hindu goddess Kali in the biggest false eyelashes you've ever seen.

00:27:18.080 Also along for the trip, besides Curtis Harrington and Anger himself, is French author Anaïs Nin,

00:27:23.780 who had previously appeared in experimental films by her husband Hugh Parker, Grier, and Maya Darin.

00:27:30.780 She appears as the goddess Astarte in one of the film's most arresting images, in which her head

00:27:35.400 is framed both by a birdcage and a sickle moon.

00:27:39.400 At 38 minutes, this is one of Anger's longest works,

00:27:42.240 and it includes overlaid excerpts from his own film,

00:27:45.460 Puce Moment.

00:27:46.900 The whole thing is set to Janathczyk's glaglolitic mass,

00:27:53.180 an incongruous choice given the film's occult themes,

00:27:56.340 and it is most likely the closest any of us 0.92

00:27:59.100 will get to see a drag baroque opera in Hades.

00:28:01.580 i mean i don't know what drag shows you go to but all right many biographies of her focus mostly on

00:28:09.600 wormwood star and pleasure dome alongside a couple other times when she flickers into light in the

00:28:14.180 popular history of the emerging counterculture like the time one of her drawings got a gallery

00:28:18.980 shut down in 1957 wallace berman had his first exhibition of his artworks at the newly opened

00:28:24.960 furious gallery in los angeles his friends were the curators owners of the gallery ed

00:28:30.520 Keinholtz, Robert Alexander, and Walter Hopps. After the opening, the LA Vice Squad got a

00:28:36.220 telephone tip from an anonymous caller, and during the raid, they found what was deemed

00:28:39.640 to be a pornographic image by Cameron Parsons, entitled Peyote Vision, at the bottom of one

00:28:45.520 of Berman's assemblage works, called Temple. He would later be convicted of displaying

00:28:50.280 lewd and obscene materials. At this summation in the courtroom, Berman wrote on the blackboard,

00:28:54.660 Berman wrote on the blackboard

00:28:57.320 there is no justice, only revenge

00:28:59.820 Berman's

00:29:01.740 mail art publication, Samina

00:29:03.120 was a series of folio packages that were

00:29:05.420 limited edition and sent or given to his

00:29:07.380 friends. Samina consisted of 0.97

00:29:09.440 collages mixed with poetry by writers

00:29:11.380 Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs

00:29:13.340 Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau

00:29:14.880 Samina was published from 1955

00:29:17.500 to 1964

00:29:18.600 and Cameron was on the cover of the first issue

00:29:21.240 Cameron had always lived out of step with

00:29:23.400 time. In the late 1950s, she was sick with allergies, rotten teeth, and an untreated ulcer,

00:29:28.840 and married for the second time, though it wouldn't work out. She performed poetry and spent time at

00:29:33.920 the Unicorn Cafe on the Sunset Strip, the first real beat hangout in the city, where Ginsberg,

00:29:39.400 Maya Angelou, and Lenny Bruce all came to perform new material. A place where rebellion had a place

00:29:45.680 to grow. At this time, Cameron was described as an explorer going into uncharted territory. Her

00:29:51.320 creative drive governed her life. There was no compromising whatsoever. Cameron's work was not

00:29:56.400 viewer-friendly. It was viewer-disturbing. In the late 50s, according to Kansa and his interview

00:30:02.360 with the founder of The Unicorn, no one thought of beat as a movement. It soon became mythologized

00:30:07.560 and refined. Within a year or two, there was an explosion of 60 coffeehouses in LA.

00:30:13.120 Increasing numbers diluted the initial hipness, and the so-called beat generation was swiftly

00:30:17.660 codified and stereotyped by the mainstream media as a bunch of goatee sporting beret wearing bongo

00:30:23.260 bashing goofs by that time it was tourists and weekend beatniks cohen explained beat had changed

00:30:29.260 already by 1959 it was exploited shops were selling black leotards and berets kerouac to me

00:30:35.380 was like bob dylan later they both wrote about people who were doing it they articulated it they

00:30:40.060 were the messengers times they are changing but they didn't change the time cameron and the people

00:30:45.700 around her were the ones actually doing it. This is quite an accolade from Cohen to one of his

00:30:50.860 former patrons, someone who still makes a big impression on him to this day. Cameron was so

00:30:56.420 striking and people were wary of her. She was not approachable. She didn't sit down and have

00:31:01.500 conversations. She wasn't a garrulous, outgoing personality. She walked around in her own space

00:31:07.380 and place. She was spacey in her own world. She was a few years ahead, more hippie than beat.

00:31:13.980 Cameron was before all of this.

00:31:16.160 She was the real thing.

00:31:17.460 She was admired and adored, and she was often alone.

00:31:22.260 She painted rocks out in the desert where she felt everything was alive and sacred,

00:31:26.380 and out there she received communications from the sky,

00:31:29.820 visions of time travel and of other dimensions.

00:31:33.440 In Kanz's book, one artist tells a story of Cameron telling him something one evening

00:31:37.460 that didn't make sense to him until 900 years later.

00:31:40.100 another says she had eyes of a werewolf where if you flinch or look away there's something lacking

00:31:46.780 in you she struggled to raise her daughter in ways that could align with her life and her visions of

00:31:51.540 the new world tanya laden is the only biographer of cameron's i found who touches seriously on

00:31:57.060 her life as a mother and grandmother and i'm so interested in how we as witch women evolve to play

00:32:02.040 these roles my daughter's almost one i got a letter this morning from a listener who shared

00:32:08.680 was me about losing her daughter but how she knew something was wrong before it happened and no one

00:32:13.500 believed her. A gift and a curse for the witch women. I cried and I cried and I laid my head 1.00

00:32:21.300 on the desk and I cried for this woman's loss and for her astonishing bravery. She tore her whole

00:32:27.820 life apart after the loss but eight years later she has happiness, love, work as an artist. She

00:32:35.080 persists and more, she fucking brilliantly shines and reaches out with vulnerability into the loving 0.98

00:32:41.400 web again. My daughter got so sick this year a couple times. I'll talk about it more in the 0.98

00:32:47.480 All Hallows episode, but I have repeatedly thought that if she died, I would need to die. I want her

00:32:53.500 to be safe and happy so badly that I semi-seriously daydream about raising her to believe there is no

00:32:58.600 world outside our little house tucked into the wooded hill looking out at our little lake.

00:33:02.780 I want to make up a whole new world for her to live in

00:33:06.280 that is beautiful and without pain 0.99

00:33:08.360 and only has like six neighbors

00:33:10.600 according to some 0.94

00:33:12.300 Cameron had dreamed for a while of getting pregnant with Jack

00:33:14.660 and after he died of getting magically pregnant with a child

00:33:17.700 that would be the outcome of their workings

00:33:19.520 when she did get pregnant with her daughter 1.00

00:33:21.400 and she named her for that perfect complex magical structure 0.95

00:33:24.780 the crystal

00:33:25.320 and she was in the midst of traveling and making art

00:33:28.220 and living with men and women who inspired her

00:33:30.340 and being part of a movement that was trying to birth

00:33:32.660 a more free, more loving, more peaceful world, I can understand that she brought her crystal

00:33:37.760 everywhere with her. That she upended the rules of the man's world to invent a new reality for

00:33:43.580 crystal. And I can also understand how that might have made a life that didn't always feel safe for

00:33:49.660 the child. Layden writes, Cameron's experimentation with drugs didn't abate once she had her daughter.

00:33:55.620 In artist John Chamberlain's unfinished 1969 film Thumbsuck, made in Santa Fe and kept at the

00:34:01.460 Cameron Parsons Foundation, Cameron is filmed applying kabuki-style makeup and smoking a blunt

00:34:06.320 while the filmmaker's children and Cameron's daughter gather around, mesmerized. She also

00:34:11.320 didn't enroll her daughter in school, preferring a sort of freestyle homeschooling. Cameron's

00:34:16.140 attitude was, the only way Crystal could learn anything was just to engage with it, Meltzer

00:34:20.060 remembers. If people didn't like it, they'd have to tell her they didn't like it, but that Cameron

00:34:24.560 wasn't going to intervene as the mom figure in any of these cases. Today, Crystal Kimmel, 58,

00:34:29.600 lives in Desert Hot Springs with her 32-year-old son. She let me stay out of school, Kimmel says

00:34:35.920 of her mother. I started being bullied because I couldn't read or write back in first grade because

00:34:40.080 I had dyslexia, and they didn't know that I had dyslexia or what it was. They thought I was

00:34:45.200 retarded, so instead of her pushing me to stay, she just kind of let me, you know, do what I wanted.

00:34:50.820 Another of Cameron's longtime friends was Patricia Quinn, ex-girlfriend of Marlon Brando and the 0.99

00:34:55.500 actress who played the title character in the 1969 film Alice's Restaurant. Quinn met Cameron in the

00:35:00.560 late 60s when both were living in Santa Fe and found herself impressed by Cameron's integrity

00:35:04.700 as an artist. I recognized her as an original, a pioneer in feminism, Quinn said. We were both

00:35:11.580 rebels, fleeing our traditional backgrounds and making a new path for ourselves. Still, Cameron's

00:35:17.580 odd parenting style worried Quinn. I had intense feelings about her mothering skills. She seemed to

00:35:22.960 distance herself from any responsibility for Crystal's actions. I was no expert myself,

00:35:28.100 but I couldn't understand her lack of concern. In the end, though, Quinn stresses that Cameron

00:35:33.140 was an honorable woman. She was true to herself, and that's why she was a great artist.

00:35:39.160 Cameron's daughter laments never having had the structure she feels she needed.

00:35:43.380 I think she could have taught me more things than I taught myself, you know. I had to grow up fast.

00:35:48.780 She didn't leave me the tools to sort of get through everything on my own.

00:35:52.840 She let me experience things with her that maybe other mothers would say,

00:35:55.940 why did Cameron do this?

00:35:57.980 You know, she let her daughter experience LSD with her when I was about nine years old.

00:36:03.640 Kimmel has raised six children of her own.

00:36:05.980 She's earthy, strong, and straightforward.

00:36:08.660 But Cameron's devotion to her art had a destabilizing effect.

00:36:12.280 As an adult, Kimmel found herself in abusive relationships and taking heavy drugs,

00:36:16.740 although she says those days are long behind her. By the end of 1973, Cameron was a grandmother,

00:36:22.240 and she settled into the role by foregoing her nomadic lifestyle in favor of fostering bonds

00:36:27.160 with her grandkids. Her firstborn grandchild, Iris Hinzo, now 40, has a unique impression of

00:36:32.320 her grandmother, one that's in contrast to the witchy, itinerant, art-destroying, scarlet woman

00:36:38.060 and negligent parent. My grandmother was the backbone of the family, Hinzo says. While Hinzo's

00:36:44.360 parents were freebasing, brawling, and calling the police, Hinzo found refuge in Cameron's

00:36:49.180 charming home in West Hollywood. It's just, she was very safe. My mom's home wasn't safe for me,

00:36:55.700 she says. My grandmother raised me pretty much. In her later years, Cameron gardened,

00:37:00.960 cooked organic food, drank tea, smoked pot, and earned a teaching certificate in Tai Chi.

00:37:07.080 She also became interested in the Hopi culture and homeopathy. She'd still perform rituals at

00:37:12.580 every solstice, burning candles, lighting incense, chanting and ringing bells like priests do,

00:37:18.240 Hinzo says with a smile. I take so much comfort in this image of Cameron as a grandmother,

00:37:24.480 a backbone, a priestess. I love getting older so much. I turned 39 this year and felt one more

00:37:31.620 layer of something shed. I am ready to own the crone. Our voices get clearer. Somehow it becomes

00:37:39.200 easier to know the things you know to apologize when you fucked up to love and share the odd and 0.96

00:37:44.420 godly thing that you are writing and making art and making up ritual and making gathering and 0.82

00:37:50.980 making a life day to day with the kid with a partner transmutes me ages me kindly if you are

00:37:58.820 in pain or feel far from your voice this moment blesses you right now on your path to find your

00:38:06.680 practice. Feel this surge come down the wire. Go forward electrified, fumbling joyfully to find the

00:38:15.820 ways you are meant to transmute and express. Writing, cooking, drawing, dancing, sewing,

00:38:22.220 metalwork, singing, video, resistance, education, healing, a new kind of practice, praxis, all your

00:38:28.780 own. Know that for Cameron, it was her through line. Nelson for LA Review of Books writes,

00:38:35.660 what clearly was her saving grace through it all was her work.

00:38:40.000 It is difficult in the context of today's art world,

00:38:42.740 its climate of production and acquisition,

00:38:45.120 and impenetrable levels of social status,

00:38:47.520 to comprehend a practice as personal as Cameron's was.

00:38:51.280 But just as the witch-woman drawings were part of her mourning process,

00:38:55.240 so was all her art a means of reckoning with reality.

00:38:59.020 And heaven knows this reality can be hard to reckon with.

00:39:01.980 but please know your making even on the smallest scale spreads a dream of wings through the

00:39:09.260 universe changes in culture happen like in the body in the dark corners the overlooked places

00:39:18.620 the microfasia and the gut it happens in the unicorn cafes and out in the desert

00:39:26.040 in the tiny box of the voting booth in the petri dish in the soft click of the keyboard

00:39:31.560 in the night. Cameron did not make art to appeal to buyers and sellers, to ease and appeal, but

00:39:37.920 instead to disturb and combust, to reckon and to mourn and to heal. Wormwood Star ends with a

00:39:47.740 refrain from Cameron's poem, Cinderella of the Wastelands, familiar to any heart-tired member

00:39:52.660 of the faithful. How long, beloved God, how long? We sing this refrain still, waiting for things to

00:40:00.360 make sense, for violence to end, for loved ones to come home safe, for wounds to heal, for a

00:40:07.120 meaningful life of kindness and art to be possible without the grinding demands of late-stage

00:40:11.880 capitalism. And so let's end with the whole poem. Let's call out alongside the Cinderella of the

00:40:18.620 wastelands, this loving, lonely call out to Babylon, to a female deity of darkness and light 0.57

00:40:26.040 in balance at last. Lift our hearts to the sky, feel our roots reach down into the earth 0.96

00:40:31.820 as we join with her in song, in reverence with the passion and bravery of a fire elemental

00:40:38.440 and the gentle steely backbone of a grandmother priestess. Seven times I rap upon the mighty door

00:40:46.080 Of the subterranean vault

00:40:47.600 Open

00:40:48.640 Open

00:40:50.980 I stand without

00:40:54.220 In the drafty and bent corridor

00:40:55.820 That approaches Dylair

00:40:57.200 Seven times resound my summons

00:41:00.500 On the stony door

00:41:01.480 And the dead stern caves

00:41:03.700 And cursed the midnight hour

00:41:05.380 Come thou forth

00:41:06.480 I bear a lamp for this terrible darkness

00:41:09.740 Thou shalt behold the face

00:41:12.300 Known in dreams

00:41:13.480 mine eyes are terrible and strange but thou knowest me behold my garments are of a rich cloth

00:41:21.200 and i bear the air of a land of bounty beyond the sea come forth thou art in the shadow of the light

00:41:28.960 i bear and thy garments reek of the dead and the sun misplaced we shall ascend the stair which is

00:41:38.000 fraught with unwholesome things. The stone rolls before me and into the blazing vault of the night

00:41:43.820 of nights we go forth as light. Dark star, I seek you in all the endless rooms of the universe.

00:41:52.040 I have entered the maze of chaos and searched the promises. No end and no fulfillment, but I have

00:41:58.620 seen your helmeted head flashing gold from all the bloody triumphs and sunsets of the world.

00:42:03.560 I have heard your voice singing lonely songs of desire in the wild wind

00:42:08.540 I remember the artistry of fingers that held the rose in wonder

00:42:13.680 Your musical throat sounding the hymn of love

00:42:17.900 Singing since the birth and the crashing star nebula

00:42:21.440 Kingdoms of muscle and star foam

00:42:25.340 Pursued and pursuing

00:42:28.840 Radiant warrior

00:42:32.140 how long my beloved god how long how long how long

00:42:40.680 you must be a witch go to foxglove farm and use offer code missing witches 0.56

Missing Witches - October 06, 2019

Missing Witches： Marjorie Cameron - I Am That Dream Of Wings

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